App System Turns a Phone Into a Fetal Monitor

An expectant mother uses the Bellabeat Connected System to monitor her fetus’s heartbeat.

Bellabeat

By Caitlan Reeg

For years, pregnant moms have pumped music into the womb with headphones. Now parents are piping sounds from the inside out.

A new gadget aims to ease the worries of budding parenthood with digital audio and social-networking technology. The Bellabeat Connected System gives expectant parents a sneak preview of a baby’s heartbeat in utero. It also creates a sound file on parents’ smartphones that can be uploaded to Facebook or email, and hosts an online community of other users.

Bellabeat, developed in Croatia, is just the latest offering in an expanding corner of the self-tracking industry. The Owlet Baby Monitor checks oxygen levels. Huggies TweetPee does just what it says—it sends a tweet when a baby has peed. The Mimo Smart Baby Monitor can beam a baby’s health stats from a gadget attached to its pajamas to the outside of a parent’s smart coffee cup.

Pair all that with adult-focused technologies—like mood-tracking apps, wireless sleep coaches, and devices logging every breath and bite over a day—and the possibilities for monitoring minutiae seem endless. Juniper Research predicts the market for smart wearable devices will reach $1.5 billion this year and $19 billion by 2018.

Expectant parents, with their nine months of worry, are a particularly fertile market for self-trackers. Judith Warner, an author on parenting, says many women strive for “a sense of control” during pregnancy.

The $129 Bellabeat software-hardware combo includes a hand-held device that uses sound waves to detect a baby’s heartbeat. The device connects to a smartphone with an audio cable, and the phone’s app creates an image of the baby’s heartbeat and records beats per minute. The sound file can be uploaded to email or Facebook. Mothers can also record their own health stats, like weight and exercise, and track them against those of other Bellabeat users.

Ena Lukic, a Bellabeat beta tester in Croatia, says when she played the heartbeat for her partner, “it was very emotional.”

But while combining hard data with the mystery of pregnancy seems like a no-brainer, Bellabeat still faces growing pains, experts say. This newest addition to the maternity market will have to shout to be heard above the din of other pregnancy gadgets and apps already competing for parents’ scattered attention.

One fetal monitor even sports a similar name: BellyBeats. Product-naming consultant Steve Manning thinks the names are too similar. “Consumer confusion with BellyBeats is inevitable,” he says, and will likely mean a lot of extra time and money spent on trying to create a separation.

Officials from BellyBeats didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Some health professionals worry a device like this would only hasten the pulse of nervous parents, not calm them. Bellabeat “sounds like a little bit of hell for any mildly anxious mother,” said Katharine Harkins, a midwife and mother of two in Seattle. “There’s enough wigging-out over the fetal heartbeat in labor, I can’t imagine exposing anyone to this throughout an entire pregnancy.”

Such reactions don’t faze Bellabeat’s Croatian and Slovak founders, a pair of entrepreneurs who have been supported by tech gurus in Berlin and Silicon Valley.

“There is no such thing as too much information when it comes to the health of yourself and your child,” says co-founder Urška Sršen.

Now that the product has been born, Ms. Sršen and her partner Sandro Mur are about to learn if that’s true.